Immortal Memories

f the Johnson Club of London at S

ho has rashly undertaken to read a paper before the Club, I admit to having supplemented these thirteen volumes by a reperusal of the little book entitled Johnson Club Papers, by Various Hands, issued in 1899 by Brother Fisher Unwin. I feel as I reread these addresses that there were indeed giants in those days, although my admiration was moderated a little when I came across the statement of one Brother that Johnson's proposal for an edition of Shakspere "came to nothing"; and the statement of another that "Gol

n the tendency to minute study of an author and his antecedents. But the lover of that author knows the fascination of the topic. He can forgive any amount of zeal. I confess that personally I stand amazed at the variety and interest of Mr. Reade's researches. Let me take a sample case of his method before coming to the main issue. In the opening pages of Boswell's Johnson there is some account of Mr. Michael Johnson, the father. The most picturesque anecdote told of Johnson Senior is that concerning a young woman of Leek in Staffordshire, who while he served his apprenticeship there conceived a passion for him, which he did not return. She followed him to Lichfield, where she took lodgings opposite to the house in which he lived, and indulged her hopeless flame. Ultimately she died of love and was buried in the Cathedral at Lichfield, when Michael Johnson put a stone over her grave. This pathetic romance has gone unchallenged by all Boswell's editors, even including our prince of editors, Dr. Birkbeck H

time and Michael twenty-nine. Even Mr. Reade's industry has not been able to discover for us why at the very last moment the marriage was broken off. It explains, however, why Michael Johnson married late in life and his melancholia. The human romance that Mr. Reade has unveiled has surely a certain interest for Johnsonians, for had Michael Johnson brought his first love affair to a happy conclusion, we should not have

this evening, each member of the Johnson Brotherhood, as is his custom, turned up Brother Birkbeck Hill's invaluable index to see what Johnson had to say upon the subject of ancestry. We know that the Doctor was very keen upon the founding of a family; that when Mr. Thrale lost his only son Johnson's sympathies went out to him in a double way, and perhaps in the greater degree because as he said to Boswell, "Sir, don't you know how you yourself think? Sir, he wished to propagate his name." Johnson himself, Boswell tells us, had no pretensions to blood. "I here may say," he sa

n his coy mistress there, he found her father dying. He passed all his leisure hours at Mr. Porter's, attending his sick bed, and in a few months after his death, asked Mrs. Johnson's consent to marry the old widow. After expressing her surprise at a request so extraordinary-"No, Sam, my willing consent you will never have to so preposterous a union. You are not twenty-five, and she is turned fifty. If she had any prudence, this request had never been made to me. Where are your means of subsistence? Por

ny of his own kin living. The number of letters the old man wrote, inquiring for this or that kinsman, are quite pathetic. It seems to me that it was really due to an ignorant vagueness as to his family history. During his early years his family had passed from affluence to penury. They were of a type very common in England, but very rare in Scotland and Ireland, that take no interest whatever in pedigre

ded, positive and affected with melancholia." "I inherited a vile melancholy from my father," Johnson tells us, "which has made me mad all my life." When he died in 1731 his effects were estimated at ￡20. "My mother had no value for his relations," Johnson tells us. "Those we knew were much lower than hers." Of Michael Johnson's brother, Andrew, Johnson's uncle, we know still less. From the various Johnson books we only cull the story mentioned in Mrs. Piozzi's Anecdotes. She relates that Johnson, after telling her of the prowess of his uncle, Cornelius Ford, at jumping, went on to say that he had another uncle, Andrew-"my father's brother, who kept the ring at Smithfield for a whole year, and was never thrown o

msher was not found, and Johnson told Dr. Vyse that he was disappointed in the inquiries that he had made for his relations. This particular relation, indeed, had been twenty-two years dead when Dr. Johnson, probably with the desire of leaving him something in his will, made these inquiries. His mother, Mrs. Gerald Skrymsher, was Michael Johnson's sister. One of her daughters became the wife of Thomas Boothby. Boothby was twice married, and his two wives were cousins, the first, Elizabeth, being the daughter of one Sir Charles Skrymsher, the second, Hester, as I have said, of Gerald Skrymsher, Dr. Johnson's uncle. Hence Johnson had a cousin by marriage who was a potentate in his day, for it is told of Thomas Boothby of Tooley Park, grand-nephew of a power

rtnight before his death as to cousins of whose life story he knew nothing, whose well-known family home of Woodseaves he-the great Lexicographer-could not spell correctly, and of whose very nam

recollections of his father's constant disputes with the Excise officers. Mr. Reade has unearthed documents concerning the crisis of this quarrel, when Michael Johnson in 1718 was indicted "for useing ye Trade of a Tanner." The indictment, which is here printed in full, charges him, "one Michael Johnson, bookseller," "that he did in the third year of the reign of our Lord George by the Grace of God now King of Great Britain, for his own proper gain, get up, use and exercise the art, mystery or manual occupation of a Byrseus, in English a Tanner, in which art,

had a genuine right to count his mother's "an old family," although the term is in any case relative. At any rate he could carry hi

rguing for yourself. I am for supporting the principle, an

seems to have had a good word was Cornelius Harrison, of whom, writing to Mrs. Thrale, he said that he was "perhaps the only one of my relations who ever rose in fortune above penury or in character above neglect." This Cornelius was the son of John Harrison, who had married Johnson's aunt, Ph?be Ford. Johnson's account of Uncle John in his Annals is not flattering, bu

s in his Annals, and also in his Prayers and Meditations. The only one of Cornelius Ford's family referred to in the biographies is Joseph Ford, the father of the notorious Parson Ford, Johnson's cousin, of whom he several times speaks. Joseph was a physician of eminence who settled at Stourbridge. He married a wealthy widow, Mrs. Hickman. He was a witness to the marriage of his sister Sarah to Michael Johnson. There can be no doubt but that the presence of Dr. Ford and his family at Stourbridge accounts for Johnson being sent there to school in 1725. He stayed in the house of his cousin Cornelius Ford, not as Boswell says his uncle Cornelius, at Pedmore, about a mi

have been one of his father's brothers, for to the Fords that distinction does not seem to have belonged. Much that is entertaining is related of the cousin Parson Ford, who, after sharing with the famous Earl of Chesterfield in many of his

married Humphrey Parsons, sometime M.P. for London and twice Lord Mayor. Thus we see that during the very years of Johnson's most painful struggle in London one of his distant cousins or connexions was Chief Magistrate of this City. Another connexion, Elizabeth Cro

undoubted prosperity of the parties at the time. The husband was fifty, the bride thirty-seven. Samuel was not born until three years and three month

f Packwood in th

aell Johnson the sum of five pounds, and to

May 1

Turnford, widow

is wife and their trustees, the sum of 200 pounds which is directed by his late father's Will to be paid to me an

rcester, Oct

Harriotts" does

ne pair of my best flaxen sheets and pillow coats, a large pewter dish and a dozen of pewter plates, provided that her husba

riotts of Try

er 23

y about the Porter family. Mr. Reade is as informative when treating of the Porters, of M

r documents copied, upon the securing of which Mr. Reade must have expended such very large sums. Dr. Hill was fully alive to this. "If I had not some private means," he wrote to a friend in 1897, "I could never edit Johnson and Boswell; but I do not get so well paid as a carpenter." As a matter of fact, I find that he lost exactly ￡3 by publishing Dr. Johnson: his Friends and his Critics. He made ￡320 by the first four years' sale of the "Boswell." This ￡320, including American rights, made the bulk of his payments for

The net price is a guinea. On Sunday he had eight glasses of hollands and seltzer-a shilling each, a pint of stout and

e for letters, but I felt that all in my possession were unsuited for publication, dealing rather freely with living persons. Brother Hill was impatient of the mere bookmaker-the literar

, also spoke very well. He is a clever fellow. He was equally complimentary. He maintained in opposition to Mr. Whale that radical was the right term, and in fact that radicalism and humanitarianism were the same. Many of them said what a light the paper had thrown on Johnson's character. One gentleman came up and congratulated me on the very delicate way in which I had handled so difficult a subject, and had not given offence to the Liberal Unionists and Tories present. Edmund Gosse, by whom I sat, was most friendly, and called the paper a wonderful tour de force, referring to the way in which I had linked Johnson's sayin

hbourne in Derbyshire with the Club, or rather with a fragment of

lover of literature. His was not an analytical mind nor was he a great critic. His views on Dante and Newman will not be shared by any of us. But, what is far more important than analysis or crit